This Krugman column is about two years old, but it just came to my attention, and I doubt much has changed since then. The French and the Japanese have been able to get more people wired to the Internet, and their connections are faster as well.

What most Americans probably don’t know is that over the last few years the situation has totally reversed. As the Internet has evolved — in particular, as dial-up has given way to broadband connections using DSL, cable and other high-speed links — it’s the United States that has fallen behind.

The numbers are startling. As recently as 2001, the percentage of the population with high-speed access in Japan and Germany was only half that in the United States. In France it was less than a quarter. By the end of 2006, however, all three countries had more broadband subscribers per 100 people than we did.

Even more striking is the fact that our “high speed” connections are painfully slow by other countries’ standards. According to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, French broadband connections are, on average, more than three times as fast as ours. Japanese connections are a dozen times faster. Oh, and access is much cheaper in both countries than it is here.

The reason for this, according to Krugman, is that the French and Japanese have better regulatory policy in place to govern those who who control the pipes from your house to the larger Internet.

For my part, I’ve generally been fairly content with my Internet service, but that could be because I don’t know any better.

EJ Dionne has a column wherein he mentions something I had noticed:

If governments around the world, including our own, had not acted aggressively — and had not spent piles of money — a very bad economic situation would have become a cataclysm.

But because the cataclysm was avoided, this is an invisible achievement. Many whose bacon was saved, particularly in the banking and corporate sectors, do not want to admit how important the actions of government were. Anti-government ideologues try to pretend that no serious intervention was required.

This reminds me of Upton Sinclair’s comment, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

We’ll continue to get Enrons and World Coms and Lehman Brothers and the Bernie Madoffs and the rest of them so long as the Masters of the Universe type propaganda goes unchecked during the boom times. This is the story line that suggests a certain few individuals have earned untold riches through their unparalleled skill, hard work and intellect. The money flowing to their companies and to them is due, in this story line, to the infallible market giving them their due. Inevitably the boom times end and the mask is, at least briefly, ripped away. We learn that these folks are relatively ordinary human beings after all. Often the wealth flowing their way had as much or more to do with luck, fraud, oddities of our economic environment, bubble making, cronyism, and other variables than with reasonable compensation for the value actually created by these individuals.

There seems to be a powerful need to forget the moments – such as last fall – when the curtain is drawn away and the Great and Powerful Oz is revealed to be a jumped up huckster. Now we’ll see the rise of a narrative where the bail out was unnecessary because the fall out would not have been so bad. (I contrast this with a slightly different narrative where the fall out would have been catastrophic, but we should have let it happen anyway so the proper lessons would get learned.) The Masters of the Universe will get back to being Masterful, the government will get back to being the enemy that never did anyone any good, and the Masters’ dynastic fortunes will return to being viewed as nothing more than proper compensation set by a rational marketplace for a job well done. Rinse. Repeat.

The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette has a couple of articles concerning Allen County and City of Fort Wayne legal fees. The lesson seems to be that, if you have a police force, you’re going to get sued. Over recent years, Allen County seems to be averaging about $200,000 per year in legal fees and about $43,000 per year in settlements. That strikes me as a pretty good ratio. The City of Fort Wayne has been spending something like $2 million per year on combined legal fees and settlements. The article cites an expert of some sort who says that Fort Wayne has a pretty good settlement history.

The lion’s share of these expenses stems from police cases. That is unsurprising. Even if you have well run police departments — and I have no particular knowledge of Allen County or Fort Wayne, one way or another — the police have to deal with inmates who are unhappy to be where they are and who have lots of time on their hands. They also get called to situations where force has to be used. Even when force is being used properly, it’s not too tough for the person on the receiving end to make allegations that can cost a municipality a lot of money to defend. The presence of “deep pockets” also skews things a bit. If you have a situation where Person A created the bad situation, where the police respond to the bad situation, and where Person B gets hurt as a result of the situation; Person B is more inclined to blame the police –at least in legal proceedings — if, as is often the case, Person A has no money. And, of course, there is always the possibility that the police will screw up in one way or another.

This is an area where municipalities don’t have a great deal of control over expenses. And, while that can help a lawyer such as myself make a living, it’s horribly annoying for taxpayers.

Marc’s comment which I am perhaps belaboring helped me articulate in my own mind something that might be obvious to others but which had been somewhat inchoate in my own head. Regulation guides innovation. The free market cannot operate in a vacuum, devoid of laws.

The bit that helped me out was this:

In essence, the way the “market” for insurance works, the incentive is directed toward innovation on abdicating the duties under the policy, not innovating to create a more efficient system.

Regulation is going to shape where the innovative energy goes. Absent any regulation at all, you get innovation on how to kill people and take their stuff. So, you outlaw murder. Then, you get innovation on how to force people to work for you without compensation. Then, you outlaw slavery. Then, you get innovation on how to con people into giving you something for nothing. Then, you outlaw fraud. Etc.

“The market” doesn’t magically direct innovation to where it is going to do the most good. It directs innovation to where it is going to profit the innovator most. It falls to the legal system to make the harmful opportunities unprofitable.

(I thought this comment from Mr. Dukes to an earlier post deserved its own post)

The idea that the government is putting health insurers out of business is a popular straw man in this debate, but like all straw men, is void of substance.

There are all sorts of services we expect our government to provide at the expense of privatization. I don’t recall anyone defending the private security firms when the TSA was formed to conduct airport screenings. And in this case, nobody is preventing health insurers from offering plans.

In addition, anyone who has this notion that health insurance is a competitive marketplace is mistaken. For the basic laws of economics to apply to a market, there are certain criteria that must be met, the cornerstone of which fails right out of the gate.

Buyers and sellers must be free to enter and exit the market place with little or no barriers to entry and exit. Clearly this is not the case with private health insurance. The inability for consumers to easily switch providers is a deal breaker here. If a person has a current health problem, they cannot switch to another provider with the same coverage because the other provider will not offer the same benefits, or they will raise price barriers that prevent any sort of market competition. In addition, we all have very little input to the purchase decisions, as they are dictated by employers in most cases. So there is no market for insurance. At least not one to which you can apply micro-economic analysis.

In addition, health insurance is insulated from being penalized for poor performance. If a bank screws up someones checking account, they move to another bank, taking their deposits and base for the bank to lend money with them. This creates a strong incentive for the bank to act in the consumer’s interest. When a health insurer does not perform, in many cases the consumer dies. Virtually no penalty for poor performance while a huge incentive to actually work against the interests of the consumer. In essence, the way the “market” for insurance works, the incentive is directed toward innovation on abdicating the duties under the policy, not innovating to create a more efficient system. Actually, the private insurers are incented to create the most inefficient system available by denying coverage, payment, and benefits to policy holders, hoping enough of them die before they can get through the 17 levels of 1-800 hell that accompanies their new found ailments.

I am convinced that anyone who thinks the health insurance industry “works” has never had to actually USE their insurance for much more than office visits.

A member of my family (mother) was diagnosed with a blood/bone cancer 18 months ago. A transplant and treatment has cost over $400,000 since then. My father was a member of a strong labor union for his entire career and because of that, my parents are better off than most. Even still, it is a Herculean effort to actually get paid for those expenses.

And I never fail to consider the person diagnosed with this sort of disease who has no health care coverage. In most of those cases the option is to check in to hospice and die.

We evaluate the public good versus liberty all the time. It is why we are screened at airports and have our phones tapped on international calls. It is why we don’t privatize the fire department. It is why we have Social Security and Medicare. This is another one of those evaluations. There are many, many ways an innovator in insurance can make a living. So health insurance isn’t one of them anymore. Seems like a trivial price to pay for the betterment of tens or hundreds of millions of lives.

Dan Froomkin has some good things to say about the current state of the health care debate.

But the fate of the public option is not yet sealed. And it’s much more than just a bargaining chip. The concept of offering health care consumers a government-run alternative to the rogues that comprise the modern American insurance industry not only has a powerful appeal to the general populace, it’s central to effective health care reform, both symbolically and concretely.

In fact, the most extraordinary thing about the mainstream media’s attitude toward the public option is how an opposition movement so obviously born of the insurance industry’s rapacious self-interest, so blatantly fueled by calls to arms that have little to no basis on reality, and so dependent on a particularly ugly strain of know-nothingism, has become viewed by our elite journalists as the pinnacle of rational centrism.

Let’s be blunt. The public option — emphasis on the word “option” — is a way to hold the insurance companies accountable should they (entirely unexpectedly, of course) fail to live up to their promises, ignore the rules, and keep doing things the way they have for the past several decades.

By contrast, the core of the argument against the public option is nothing more than a sort of whiny plaint of “Leave the insurance companies alone!”

We’re getting the same crappy journalism, by and large, that fueled the Iraq War. Credulous regurgitation and a focus on process over substance.

The concept of the public option is fairly simple. It’s a safety valve that keeps insurers honest. It’s a check and a balance to their natural incentive to put profit ahead of paying out (in their jargon) “medical loss” (i.e. the very thing you pay your premiums to get.) The insurance is able to dump $1 million/day into lobbying against health care reform — clearly your ever-increasing premiums haven’t been entirely devoted to increasing medical costs as we have been lead to believe.

Oh, and another thing, this bit irked me:

The high priests of Washington conventional wisdom summed things up this morning in a Washington Post editorial calling for the public plan to die. “This is not a matter of ideology but of political nose-counting,” said the editorial. “[T]here’s no way to amass 60 votes with a public option in the bill.”

You don’t need 60 votes for the public option. You only need 50 votes for the public option. You need 60 votes against filibustering a health care bill. Not voting for a public option is not the same thing as filibustering a health care bill that contains it. We need to know if, among others, Senator Bayh is committed to killing a health care bill that a majority of the Senate supports.

There is a strong strain of anti-happiness in the American tradition. Near as I can figure, it comes from the notion that humans are worthless worms of creation and deserve to burn in eternal hellfire immediately. Any discomfort less severe than that is righteous and almost kindly by comparison. I’m drawing that particular narrative from Jonathan Edwards’ 1741 famous sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. You can hear echoes of this sermon in the debates over sexuality — aversion to measures that would reduce pregnancy and STDs combined with hostility to abortions makes a bit more sense if one sees communicable diseases and pregnancy as righteous punishment for sinful lust.

Anne Laurie at Balloon-Juice notes a related meme making its way through the media in the health care debate: We’re fat pigs who don’t deserve quality health care because being sick is righteous punishment for our gluttony and sloth. Our desire to have the kind of health care enjoyed by others is evidence of greed and envy. (Opponents succumbing to wrath can, therefore, be excused presumably.)

Ms. Laurie:

Looks like the new Media Village talking point has been distributed: Americans don’t deserve a decent health care system because we are disgusting fat pigs.

There’s a point (around 3:00) in the MSNBC clip John posted earlier where Taibbi talks about America’s relatively high infant mortality rate and low life expectancy, and Maria Bartiromo interrupts to snarl, “We’re OBESE!” with the same combination of loathing & denunciation that a televangelist would use for “We have sinned!” Bartiromo, of course, is not obese—her television contract is based on her meeting certain standards of attractiveness, and I’m sure it includes clauses covering the personal trainers, gym memberships, nutritionists, and whatever other outside assistance is required to keep Bartiromo up to those standards. But the rest of us, well, how can we expect our babies to stay alive if we insist on being willfully, knowingly “obese”?

Then, in the WSJ op-ed John linked later in the evening, anesthesiologist and anti-happiness crusader Dr. Ronald Dworkin complains that Obama’s threatened health reforms will drive skilled professionals like himself out of the medical business, because taxes are too high and Medicare compensation is too low and frankly, smart people don’t want to work that hard. Also, “Americans have grown very fat. This complicates anesthesia tremendously. Putting in IVs, spinals and epidurals is harder. Inserting breathing tubes is much more dangerous. “ True enough, but then, he’s getting paid somewhere north of $300k a year to deal with those complicated fat people. “Quality of care will inevitably decline. That decline will come first in obstetrics… “ Go away, fat people, or the laboring mothers and their babies will suffer!

Now, it’s entirely possible I’m reading more into this than necessary. The anti-happiness strain in American thought certainly makes us receptive to the message, but all Occam’s razor probably requires for our receptiveness is that obesity is a simple scapegoat and easier to blame than the bewildering interlocking pieces of the health system. When confronted with the cascading failure presented by the relationships between general practitioners, specialists, network doctors, non-network doctors, co-pays, contract adjustments, deductibles, hospital charge masters, premiums, pre-existing conditions, diagnostic testing, HMOs, PPOs, health insurers, and everything else; well, it’s easier to just blame the fat person.

In the quest to eradicate drunk driving, the most frequent approach is to focus on reducing the drinking part of the equation. Muncie tavern owners, who obviously have an interest in keeping the drinking side of things robust, are apparently taking measures to reduce the need for driving.

Just as Indiana State Police and other local enforcement begin a Labor Day crackdown on intoxicated driving, a group of Delaware County bar owners will pay a local taxi service to provide home-to-bar, bar-to-bar and bar-to-home transportation every day until the 3 a.m. closing time. That service begins today.

PDQ Taxi owners Brad and Karen Luttrell had proposed the free-ride program, to be subsidized by the Delaware County Licensed Beverage Association.

Drunk driving tends to go hand-in-hand with a subpar public transit system. Offering free rides from bars is a good idea if the tavern owners and taxi or shuttle services can make profitable. But I suspect it only works where most of your patrons are coming from a relatively limited geographic donut — not so close that they were just going to walk in the first place and not so far as to make the amount of driving by the taxi unreasonable.

Yesterday, I got to wondering why we weren’t hearing more about Congressional hearings on health care — not so much hearings about how to move forward, but hearings on what’s going on with the status quo. Seemed like with so many insurance companies trying to throttle the health care reform baby in its cradle, we’d maybe see the glare of Congressional subpoenas start to rain down on the health insurance industry. Rep. Waxman seems to be stepping in that direction.

The request included records relating to compensation of highly paid employees, documents relating to companies’ premium income and claims payments, and information on expenses stemming from any event held outside company facilities in the past 2 1/2 years.
. . .
Among the documents requested were records relating to compensation paid to any company executive earning more than $500,000 in any year from 2003 to 2008.

Waxman and Stupak also sought documents relating to premiums paid by policy holders, claims payments, sales expenses, administrative expenses and profits, broken down by categories such as employer-provided coverage; individual coverage, Medicare and Medicaid.

Emptywheel adds:

He’s asking for the following by September 4:

* A table listing the total compensation for every employee making more than $500,000 a year
* A table listing board member compensation
* A table listing off-site conferences and retreats
* A table listing the company’s total revenue and net income

And the following by September 14:

* Communication with the board on compensation packages
* Tables listing premium revenue, claims payments, and sales expenses

Perhaps this sort of documentation would allow us to determine whether our own Evan Bayh is the Senator from Indiana or the Senator from Wellpoint. I’m not asking the good Senator to go so far as to actually vote for a liberal health care system, but I’d appreciate it if he would commit to not filibustering health care legislation and let it rise or fall on its own. And, for that matter, if it does come down to a filibuster, I hope any fence-sitting Democrats are forced to cast a vote.

Speaking of hardball – the Progressive wing of the Democrats in the House are starting to play a little.

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she won’t be able to pass health-care legislation in her chamber if the measure doesn’t include a government-run insurance plan to compete with private insurers.

“There’s no way I can pass a bill in the House of Representatives without a public option,” Pelosi, a California Democrat, said at a press conference in San Francisco today.

The thing is that, until some Republicans commit to actually voting for a final package, there is no sense in trying to accommodate them. Why include their ideas if doing so won’t add a vote to the total?

Seth Slabaugh, writing for the Indianapolis Star, reports that the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission (IURC) will be holding hearings on utility tree trimming practices.

I’m biased on this issue after having had my own run-in with an electric company that wanted to cut down some of my trees. I had a line of trees blocking my house from a busy road to the west and, beyond that, a big expanse of field where the wind could really get howling. The line of trees were a barrier to the wind and the road. They were under some electric transmission lines, but the tops of the trees were something like 15 feet below the power lines. One day, my wife found people working on behalf of the electric company starting to take a chain saw to one of the trees and, naturally, asked them what the hell they were doing. They said they were with the electric company and apparently mumbled something about how we should have received notice. In fact there had been notice and my wife made them get off our property. I went and dug up the easement for the power lines, read it, and exchanged letters with counsel for the power company where I explained why their easement gave them no right to cut down my trees. The company never formally agreed with me, but they just sort of disappeared and our trees remained untouched until we eventually moved. I forget the exact language, but the easement gave them the right — understandably — to take reasonable measures to keep vegetation from interfering with their power lines.

And that’s the problem, as I see it. Power companies usually just want to take a chainsaw to the trees which is probably the cheapest solution but isn’t necessarily permitted by the terms of their easement if there are less intrusive (even if more expensive) ways for them to keep trees from interfering with their power lines.

In Muncie, the IURC hearing is scheduled for 8/31 at 6 p.m. at the Central High School auditorium. On the pro-property owner side of the issue is Charlie Goodman who has a website. He reports that the IURC will also hold these additional hearings:
Indianapolis – Pike High School – September 2
Seymour – September 8
Merrillville – September 23
Fort Wayne – September 29
Evansville – October 7

The Office of the Utility Consumer Counselor has more information here.